More on Textured Tubes

I recently purchased a few more texture plates by Helen Breil which are so much fun to play with.  I love the deep textures and flexibility of them so I can run them through my pasta machine with the clay but had discovered they are a little too flexible to use for the textured tubes.  My Textured Tubes tutorial is available in our ArtFire Studio as well as our Etsy Shop.

Solution:

Make a copy of the texture plate with regular clay and/or the Sculpey Bake & Bend.

Tip:

If I'm going to use my texture for tubes only,  I prefer to make the texture sheet a little thicker and out of regular clay as I don't need it to be flexible.  I also don't need a large texture plate -- just an area large enough to texture my beads or a pen blank.

How:

In this case I wanted my texture to be exactly like the original texture sheet so this is what I did:

I studied the texture sheets to see what areas I would want to use and would work well for the tubes.  I then made a texture plate of that area from Sculpey Bake & Bend, using my pasta machine so I could get a deep impression.

After baking, I created another texture plate from the one I just made but this time making it with regular clay and running it through my pasta machine again so I could still keep that nice deep impression.

Voila!  I now have a texture sheet that is an exact replica of my original but out of regular clay that I can use to make my textured tubes!

And here are some tube beads I created from the new texture sheet....

These were made using a turquoise color mix called Lagoon (recipe #8-3 in Carolyn's Color System Tutorial) and highlighted with antique copper mica powder pigments.  I embedded some antique copper beads into the ends before baking like I showed in a previous blog post.

I have a necklace design in mind for these beads and will show you when it is finished.

Texture Inspiration

What is this?  In our last post we shared about our Kreative Blogger Award and what inspired us.  I mentioned how I am drawn to the colors and textures of fabric and textiles.  Well this is an example of what I do with them.  The above photo is a texture plate I created out of polymer clay from this:

I was going through my bag of old lace and doilies and found this one that was quite tattered and worn and decided it would be perfect for some of my faux tapestry or brocade designs.  I will post something I made from it a little later.